Prevalence of health behaviors among a university staff: an exploratory study.

Introduction In the USA, the leading causes of death among adults are associated with chronic diseases like heart disease, cancer, diabetes. (1) Developing countries are also heavily burdened by these chronic diseases. (2) Most of these diseases are influenced by health compromising behaviors like smoking, alcohol intake, and physical inactivity. Further, obesity and overweight are significantly associated with several major health problems like diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, asthma, arthritis, and poor health status. (3) A healthy lifestyle is associated with a decrease in chronic diseases and an increase in lifespan. (4) Nutrition plays an important role in health. For example, eating breakfast regularly is an important contributor to a healthy lifestyle and health status. Regular breakfast eating improves the overall diet quality of adults. (5) Studies have shown that skipping breakfast is associated with obesity. (6,7) Smith (8) indicated that irregular breakfast consumption may decrease intelligence in older adults. Health"compromising behaviors have been associated with socio"economic factors like education and employment. (9) For example, prevalence of smoking was higher (37%) among populations who had earned a high school diploma or had less education but lower (14%) among people who had earned undergraduate degrees. (10) Berrigan and associates (11) documented that age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, and income were associated with health behavior patterns. In the USA, over 75% of healthcare dollars is spent on chronic disease (12) while 45% of the working-age population (18"64 years old) has a chronic condition.13 Workplace health promotion is a way to reduce this cost. In the USA, three million employees work for 2,600 four-year degree-granting institutions. Hence, universities are an easy location for worksite health promotion and a way to reduce healthcare cost for a sizeable number of the workforce. (14) Assessing the health behavior patterns of this population is critical in planning health promotion. The purpose of this exploratory work is to evaluate the prevalence of selected health behaviors among non-faculty staff for future intervention study. More specifically, this study also aims to explore the relationship of irregular breakfast eating with other health-compromising behaviors. Regular breakfast eating is an important factor for everyone's healthy life style and health status. Previous studies that explored the relationship between skipping breakfast and associated health behaviors mostly focused on children and adolescence. Very few focused on adults. Results of this study will add to the literature about the pattern of breakfast eating and its relationship to other life style related health behaviors. Method The study protocol and survey were approved by the university's Institutional Review Board for protection of human subjects. After obtaining written permission to administer the survey, email addresses were obtained from the Office of Human Resources at the university. In this study, 4,238 recruitment emails were sent to university staff workers at the Midwestern university. Of those emails, 32 were undeliverable and the maximum number of participants who had possibly received the email was 4,206. A total of 899 subjects (response rate 21.37 %) completed the questionnaire, and 26 individuals visited the information page of the study but did not complete the questionnaire. No incentive was offered and no reminder emails were sent as permission was given for one-time administration only. A similar response rate was obtained in sending a single email message by Kaplowitz, Hadlock, and Levine. (15) When potential participants clicked the hyperlink on the invitation email, they connected to a web page containing information about the study and a consent form. To proceed with the study, participants were required to click a button to indicate their consent to participate in the online study. …